How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth

By David Clarke

“Cover[s] all the major themes of ufology, ranging from lights in the sky to crashed saucers, government cover-ups and alien abductions . . . fascinating.” —Popular Science Books

Neither a credulous work of conspiracy theory nor a skeptical debunking of belief in “flying saucers,” How UFOs Conquered the World explores the origins of UFOs in the build-up to the First World War and how reports of them have changed in tandem with world events, science and culture. The book will also explore the overlaps between UFO belief and religion and superstition.

“An insightful, informative and thought-provoking book on UFOs and the UFO culture . . . In the following ten chapters, he writes about his pursuit of the ‘truth’ about UFOs. It is a fascinating journey.” —Skeptic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781781314722

David Clarke

David Clarke’s first pamphlet, Gaud, won the Michael Marks award in 2013. His first collection, Arc, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015 and was longlisted for the Polari Prize. Another pamphlet, Scare Stories, was published by V Press in 2017 and was named a Poetry School ‘Book the Year.’ His second collection, The Europeans, was published by Nine Arches in 2019. His poems have appeared in publications including Magma, Poetry Wales and The Guardian.

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How UFOs Conquered the World

How UFOs Conquered the World

For the Duke of Mendoza and fellow pelicanists, but most of all for my Waud-Bee.

Contents

List of Illustrations

A Note to Readers

Introduction: The UFO Syndrome

1. Extravagant Fiction Today – Cold Fact Tomorrow

2. I Know What I Saw

3. Purple Lights and March Foolishness

4. The James Bond Department

5. Demand the Truth

6. The Crashed Saucer Syndrome

7. Cosmic Voices

8. They Are Coming to Take Me Away

9. Angels or Demons?

10. Take Me to Your Leading Scholars!

Conclusion: In the Eye of the Beholder

Glossary

Notes and References

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Strange aerial phenomena were recorded long before the birth of flying saucers in post-WW2 America. This broadsheet shows black spheres engaged in apparent aerial combat over Basel, Switzerland, in August 1566. Mary Evans Picture Library

This drawing published in a Californian newspaper shows a large, oblong propeller-driven ‘phantom airship’ with searchlights that appeared over Sacramento in November 1896. Press accounts triggered an epidemic of similar sightings across North America during the spring of 1897. Mary Evans Picture Library

The modern UFO phenomenon was born on 24 July 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine mysterious objects that flew ‘like a saucer would if you skipped it across water’. Arnold described and drew bat-wing or crescent-shaped objects but this image, published by Fate magazine in 1948, depicted them as circular or saucer-shaped. Mary Evans Picture Library

This headline in the London Sunday Dispatch on 1 October 1950 launched the craze for seeing flying saucers in British skies. The newspaper’s editor, Charles Eade, was persuaded to run the story by a member of the Royal family, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, who was convinced that UFOs were spacecraft from Mars or Venus. Author’s collection

For several nights in August 1951, residents of Lubbock in Texas saw formations of UFOs in the night sky. Carl Hart took four photographs and the Lubbock Lights swiftly became a UFO legend. But a US Air Force investigation decided they were caused by ground lights reflected from the bodies of migrating plovers. Mary Evans Picture Library

Donald Keyhoe (1897-1988) was a US Marine Corps aviator and pulp-fiction author. His books helped to transform flying saucers into a modern myth. Keyhoe’s writings introduced the idea that extraterrestrial spacecraft have been visiting us in greater numbers since WW2 as a result of our nuclear experiments and the US authorities are involved in a cover-up of the truth. Duane Howell/The Denver Post via Getty Images

In the summer of 1952 Britain’s seventy-seven year-old Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so concerned about news of UFO sightings over Washington DC that he fired off this memo to his Secretary of State for Air, Lord Cherwell, demanding to know ‘what is the truth’. The National Archives

The response to Churchill’s question came from the Air Ministry who revealed that ‘a full intelligence study’ had concluded that flying saucers did not exist. The conclusion reached by the MoD’s Flying Saucer Working Party in 1951 was based upon a scientific principle, Ockham’s Razor, that says when confronted with two competing hypotheses the one that makes the fewest unwarranted assumptions should be selected. The National Archives

Major Hector Quintanilla with other members of the United States Air Force’s official UFO Project, Blue Book, in 1955. Blue Book closed in 1969 after the University of Colorado’s report that concluded there was no evidence the ten per cent of sightings in the project files that remained unexplained were alien spacecraft or that UFOs posed any threat to national security. Mary Evans Picture Library

In 1955 a think tank commissioned by Project Blue Book tried to create a stereotypical image of a flying saucer by harvesting details from 4,000 separate eye-witness accounts. They failed. This chart produced by a British UFO club, Contact UK, in 1971 shows that no two UFOs are identical. The National Archives

Dr J. Allen Hynek (1910-1986) was an astronomer who acted as scientific advisor to Project Blue Book. Hynek created the phrase ‘close encounters’ as part of his classification system for the residue of unexplained reports that puzzled him. He made a cameo appearance at the end of Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Mary Evans Picture Library

Meteorological officer Irving Newton poses with the debris from the ‘flying saucer’ that was discovered by rancher Mac Brazel in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. When the Air Force announced the wreckage came from a weather balloon the media lost interest in the story. Today millions of people believe this was a lie and the US government is hiding the UFO logical equivalent of the Holy Grail at the top security facility called Area 51 in Nevada. Mary Evans Picture Library

A farmer inspects a landed flying saucer in an English field as a police officer keeps his distance. On the morning of 4 September 1967 the police and RAF were flooded with calls from the public reporting the discovery of six landed UFOs at locations forming a diagonal line across the southern counties. Mirrorpix

Farnborough Technical College students Chris Southall (right) and helper David ‘Boots’ Harrison holding the mould they used to create the fake saucers as part of a rag-week stunt. At a press conference Southall said: ‘We believe flying saucers could land one day, so we landed our own to give the authorities some practice.’ Mirrorpix

An advertisement for the 1956 book by Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, that introduced the sinister Men In Black who silence UFO witnesses. His book helped to stoke the obsession with cover-ups, conspiracies and general paranoia that is now characteristic of the UFO syndrome. Mary Evans Picture Library

One of the more amusing letters I discovered during my research into the Ministry of Defence UFO records at The National Archives. Written in red ink and signed by ‘An Alien’ this was just one of thousands of documents that are described by the Press as ‘Britain’s X-Files’. The National Archives

A cartoon published by a national newspaper during the ‘flying cross’ flap of 1967-68 that found its way into the MoD’s UFO files. Author’s collection

An example of the standard report form used by the MoD to record basic details of sightings until the closure of the ‘UFO desk’ in 2009. In this case the RAF desk officer added his own artistic interpretation of a flying saucer and its alien occupant. The National Archives

Aliens with large heads and eyes examine an abducted female earthling while her companion is rendered powerless to resist. This image appeared on the cover of the pulp magazine Astounding Stories in 1935, three decades before the first genuine account of a real ‘alien abduction’ was published. MEPL

A drawing of Orthon, the captain of a Venusian flying saucer scout-ship, that landed in California’s Mojave Desert in November 1952. The image is based on the story told by the Polish-American contactee George Adamski (1891-1965). (Illustrated magazine, October 1953.) Author’s collection

A painted stone at the summit of Holdstone Down in north Devon where, at midnight on 23 July 1958, taxi-driver George King claimed he met ‘The Master Jesus’ who descended to Earth in a flying saucer. King (1919-1997) was the leader of The Aetherius Society, one of the first flying saucer religions. Author’s collection

Betty and Barney Hill photographed in 1966, five years after their claimed abduction by aliens on a country road in New Hampshire. They hold John Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey that tells the story that provided the template from which all alien abduction stories trace their origins. Mary Evans Picture Library

Father Paul at home in Glastonbury, Somerset, during the spring of 2005. Otherwise known as Lt Commander Eric Inglesby (1915-2010), for many years he was Britain’s best known Christian UFO theorist. He believed flying saucers were demonic messengers of deception. Author’s collection

Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) was an American artist and author who became the leading personality in the UFO abduction syndrome as a result of his 1981 book Missing Time. Mary Evans Picture Library/Stacy Collection

The flying saucer has often become shorthand for what the BBC has called ‘the gleaming, jet-propelled, post-war vision of the future.’ Among the pop culture creations inspired by saucers was the round, prefabricated Futuro house designed by Matti Suuronan during the 1960s and 1970s. This example was on display in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, during a UFO flap in 1979-80. Pat Pickles

Small paper lanterns were first used in China as military signals but more recently people in the West have released them on special occasions such as festivals and weddings. The craze spread to Britain in 2002 and by the end of that decade hundreds of UFO sightings caused by ‘sky lanterns’ were reported in the media and logged by the Ministry of Defence’s UFO desk. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

The enormous extraterrestrial ‘mothership’ hovers above the Devil’s Tower monument in Wyoming at the climax of Steven Spielberg’s 1978 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Columbia/The Kobal Collection

In the movie, engineer Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is struck by a beam of light from a UFO on a lonely highway. This close encounter sends him on an obsessive quest to discover ‘the truth’ behind his extraordinary experience. Columbia/The Kobal Collection

Steven Spielberg’s special effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi designed the alien creatures that emerge from the UFO at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His inspiration came not from real-life accounts of UFO occupants, as many believe, but from science fiction. Columbia/The Kobal Collection

A Note to Readers

To steal a cliché from the pilot episode of The X-Files this is a true story ‘inspired by actual documented accounts’. What follows is distilled from interviews and investigations conducted during three decades of participant observation within the UFO subculture. The role I have chosen to adopt is that of a journalist reporting upon one of the most widespread and pervasive myths of modern times. It is a myth that in little more than six decades has conquered the world.

This book is not intended to be a definitive explanation of the UFO mystery. Neither is my use of the word ‘myth’ meant to imply that any or all UFO phenomena, or related beliefs, are true or false. My subject matter is not UFOs per se but the people who see and believe in them. For this reason the story is presented in the first person and draws upon a number of journalistic styles including investigative, literary and gonzo. I see it as a rough draft of the history of the UFO syndrome as I have come to understand it. I may be a reporter but like many fellow travellers I also remain a pilgrim on the road to enlightenment. So any errors or omissions are entirely my own.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to numerous friends and colleagues who helped in the conception, construction, writing and drafting of this book. First and foremost among these is Peter Brookesmith who provided sources, advice, proofreading, fact checking and wise counsel from the beginning almost to the end. I am also grateful for access to the encyclopedic mind of the indefatigable Marty Kottmeyer. I must, of course, thank my wife Carolyn for her constant and unstinting support, and for adopting the role of avatar at a crucial moment. More thanks must go to Martyn and Steve for helping me to remember; and to Keith for providing technical and IT assistance.

Among the others who deserve specific acknowledgement are the writers and contributors to Magonia, specifically John Rimmer, John Harney, Peter Rogerson and Nigel Watson. Fellow saucerer Andy Roberts as always provided attitude where it was needed; Richard Jenkins supplied papers and key definitions. The late Hilary Evans was ever-helpful before pen was put to paper and I miss his erudition and guidance. Thanks also – in no particular order – to Ian Ridpath, Bob Sheaffer, Tim Printy, Ben Radford, Robert Bartholomew, Chris French, Jenny Randles, Joe McGonagle, Gary Anthony, Paul Fuller, David Barrett, Mark Pilkington, John Lundberg, John Keeling, Phil Mantle, Nick Redfern, Andrew May and Bill Spaulding for their input both past and present.

I also wish to thank those who, at various stages, agreed to be interviewed both as part of my ongoing research and for the specific purposes of this project. Space considerations meant that many did not make it to the final cut: Denis Plunkett, Alan Biggs, Alex Cassie, Mark Stenhoff, Chris French, Jim Carruthers, John Keel, Kevin Goodman, Gary Heseltine, Father Paul, Lyn Thomas, Dan Denis, Linda Unwin, David Simpson and Paul Davies.

I drew upon a huge collection of archive material in the preparation and writing of this book and am grateful to the staff of The National Archives at Kew, Churchill College, Cambridge, the Broadlands Archives, the BBC Written Archives and the British Library who have assisted with my research during the past two decades.

Last but not least, thanks to Chelsey who found a home for this project and to my editor Sam who skilfully and patiently guided it from birth to launch pad.

Introduction: The UFO Syndrome

If I could pinpoint the precise moment when my long, strange trip began I would say it was a rainy spring night in 1977. Unusually, my parents had allowed me to stay up beyond the 9 p.m. watershed to watch our prized new colour television and what I saw next sparked something inside me that still remains a huge influence upon my life.

On the screen it was a sunny English afternoon, with scattered clouds and a blue sky, and the camera panned across a vista of green rolling hills. Enter two young men in their early twenties, trudging along a footpath. Something told me these were not ramblers out for a stroll in the countryside: both had bulky headphones clamped over their ears and in their hands were short metal poles attached to shiny dishes, which they jabbed spasmodically at the heavens. They were UFO hunters.

‘Nothing up in that part of the sky,’ one advised the other. ‘Try over towards Dorking.’ As the wind whipped around them, he clasped an unruly anorak with one hand while he manipulated his dish with the other. ‘If there’s any spacecraft up there you should pick it up because they have a magnetic force field around them.’

His friend sported John Lennon sunglasses, a wispy beard and raffish hair. ‘If they’re here they’re hidden well and truly in the clouds,’ he retorted, pointing his own dish towards a cluster of fluffy cumulus. ‘Scan along the edge of the cloud because very often they hide. They use the clouds as cover you see, the crafty so-and-sos.’

Their daytime search for extraterrestrials on the Sussex Downs came to an end and the men revealed what they did for a living. ‘I work for the London Electricity Board,’ the man in the anorak explained. ‘And Paul is an embalmer. So we don’t get an awful lot of free time.

‘What we are trying to do is obtain contact or actually pick up some kind of intelligent message from the people who pilot these craft,’ he elaborated. Although their UFO detectors had failed to find any, their faith remained unshaken.

By now my curiosity was piqued. Like most schoolboys I was aware of UFOs, or flying saucers as they were also known, but I had never encountered adults who took the idea seriously. Later in the programme, a montage of UFO images filled the screen. A drawing showed black objects circling the heavens above a medieval city; another depicted cylinders and discs engaged in aerial combat. The presenter, Hugh Burnett, narrated that strange objects had been sighted in the sky since the beginning of recorded history. They were usually described as circular, disc- or cigar-shaped. During the past century hundreds of photographs had been taken showing what appeared to be UFOs; many had been dismissed as fakes but others remained unexplained. Then the grainy black-and-white images were replaced by colour film footage showing a huge object with a long tail zooming through the atmosphere. Below, groups of people on a beach could be seen gazing upwards in amazement.

From that moment any scepticism I had about the idea that we were being observed by creatures from other worlds evaporated. I was ten years old and spent much of my time soaking up books, comics and television programmes on space travel and science fiction.

At this early stage of my interest in the subject, Burnett’s documentary, Out of this World, acted like a marker post. It impressed me because he allowed the people who saw UFOs to explain what they believed and why they believed. It left me searching for more. I had read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s stories about the adventures of John Carter of Mars, and my growing appetite for science fiction and fantasy had led me to devour John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Now words from the opening of Wells’s novel drifted into my mind: ‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own . . .’

I knew The War of the Worlds and other stories I had read about alien invasions were fiction, but the Cold War with the Soviet Union was very much a fact and throughout my childhood the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present. My family lived in a post-war, semi-detached house in the industrial heartland of northern England, surrounded at that time by coalmines and steelworks, and my parents ran a car-breakdown business servicing the nearby M1 motorway. During the summer my father, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, would take us to watch the airshow at RAF Finningley, near Doncaster. Finningley was a base for Britain’s V-bomber force that would, in the event of war, carry tactical nuclear weapons deep inside the Iron Curtain. It was obvious this would make us a prime target when the Third World War broke out. One day I opened our local newspaper and in the centre spread was a map of our region, overlaid with a circular zone depicting in graphic detail the carnage that would result if an atomic bomb were dropped on the airbase. It was clear to me that our house, along with everything and everyone I knew, would be reduced to radioactive rubble in the resultant firestorms. This wasn’t over-dramatising the situation; occasionally my school would test its air-raid sirens as part of the area’s civil defence preparations and each time a shiver would run through me.

It was comforting at that time to think there was someone, or something, out there watching over us, as many of those interviewed for Out of this World seemed to believe. What if aliens had been visiting us throughout Earth’s history? Not bug-eyed monsters, as Wells had imagined, but creatures so highly advanced that their technology might seem like magic to us?

Meanwhile, in BBC television’s Doctor Who, actor Tom Baker played the mysterious Doctor, an alien who explored both time and space in his TARDIS, a spacecraft that, from the outside at least, resembled a London police box. In 1977 the Doctor was stalked by the fearsome Robots of Death and their silver-suited leader and some earlier serials had shown the Time Lord’s cyborg enemies the Daleks travelling in flying saucers. Years later I discovered that the shape of the Dalek saucers had been changed to resemble those described by a Polish–American UFO contactee, George Adamski, who claimed to have met the pilot of a Venusian spacecraft in the Mojave Desert. Doctor Who and other science fiction series such as Star Trek and UFO were a constant topic of conversation among my school friends. The dark premise of the latter was that Earth in the 1980s was under attack by aliens from a dying planet who were secretly abducting humans in order to steal their internal organs. We all believed aliens existed; we all took it for granted that, when we were older, space travel would be as commonplace as the bus that carried us into the city centre.

Not long after Out of this World I was distracted by an item on John Craven’s Newsround, a BBC news programme for children. Sandwiched between items about stranded whales and a fire at an oil depot was a story about an extraordinary UFO sighting in Broad Haven, a seaside town in west Wales. Presenter John Craven revealed that Wales was in the middle of a UFO ‘flap’ (in the jargon used by enthusiasts). Accounts of both flying saucers and silver-suited aliens were flooding into police stations and newspapers.

In the midst of this ‘flap’, fifteen children in Broad Haven said they saw a silver cigar-shaped spaceship in fields behind their primary school during their lunch break. All boys, they could have been my friends and me. They were playing football when they noticed something odd sitting in a field beyond the perimeter fence. Although it was raining heavily and ‘the thing’ was partly obscured by foliage, they could see enough to identify it as a spaceship – a UFO.

Two of the children said the ‘saucer’ had a silver dome with a flashing light on the top. One said it was red. Some, but not all, heard a humming noise. Six said they had seen a man, or two men, standing near the object. ‘We saw something come out of it. It had a helmet on its head,’ one claimed. Another described ‘a silver man with spiked ears’, while a third added: ‘He wasn’t a very tall person, and he didn’t look very nice either.’

As I listened to their story it made me wonder if they had seen the Robots of Death from Doctor Who. But this was no TV drama, it was real. The boys were visibly shaken by their experience and had rushed back to break the news to their headmaster, Ralph Llewellyn. Despite their protestations, he wasn’t sufficiently persuaded to go see the UFO himself, even though one small boy ‘was crying because he was scared that he was going to be disintegrated or something’. But with his pupils still insistent and the story spreading beyond the school gates, Llewellyn sat them down and asked them to sketch what they had seen. Photographs in the press showed the children holding up pictures they had drawn of the ‘flying saucer’. They all looked remarkably similar.

The next day I rose early, before school, and jogged to our newsagent’s. Ignoring the comic books, I rifled through the tabloids looking for any mention of the west Wales UFO flap or ‘Broadhaven Triangle’, as Newsround had called it. Finding nothing, I resolved to immerse myself in a subject that had begun to fascinate me. Soon my collection of science fiction novels had been dumped into a cardboard box. Occupying their space on my bookshelf was a set of new paperbacks and pride of place among them was Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? My edition had the provocative subtitle: Was God an Astronaut? I discovered the Swiss author’s theory that the Earth had been visited by ‘ancient astronauts’ in prehistory – aliens who had manipulated human evolution and were the source of our myths and legends – was consistent with the plots of the Doctor’s adventures in the TARDIS. Chariots of the Gods? was published in 1968 and in the following decade there was only one year in which there was no reference to ancient astronauts in the BBC series. Assorted extraterrestrials were credited with everything from the origin of life on Earth to the construction of prehistoric monuments such as the Pyramids and Stonehenge. In one 1975 episode even the Loch Ness Monster was revealed as an alien creation, having been deposited in Scotland by the Zygons, a race stranded on Earth since the twelfth century.

Alongside the books by Erich von Däniken were UFO: Flying Saucers over Britain? by Robert Chapman and Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle. Chapman was the Sunday Express science correspondent and offered a very matter-of-fact approach to UFO sightings in Britain during the 1960s. His cautious investigations stood in stark contrast to the wide-eyed speculation of Berlitz. The idea of geographical ‘triangles’ formed by drawing lines on a map around the sites of strange and unexplained events was popular at that time, as reflected in media coverage of the Welsh sightings. Everyone had heard of the deadly Bermuda Triangle, where Berlitz claimed more than one thousand people and a large number of ships and planes had vanished without trace. As my collection expanded, these paperback classics nestled alongside Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space, The Hynek UFO Report and John Keel’s UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. Keel, like Chapman, was a journalist but his books were filled with wild stories told by people who claimed to have met and communicated with UFO occupants. It was through Keel that I was introduced to the legend of the mysterious Men in Black or MIB; the secret agents who threatened and harassed UFO witnesses who got too close to ‘the truth’.

Unlike the two men with their UFO detectors or the children caught up in the ‘Welsh Triangle’, my new obsession did not furnish me with my own sighting of an unidentified flying object. Neither did I have any unwelcome visitations from the MIB. The nearest I came to a personal experience happened not while searching the sky, but when gazing at a big screen in my local cinema. During the spring of 1978 the Gaumont in my home city of Sheffield ran two Hollywood blockbusters side by side. The epic space adventure Star Wars had already broken box-office records and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind looked set to follow it.

Long before Spielberg’s UFOs appeared on celluloid they were anticipated in a flurry of tabloid headlines. The Daily Express serialised the screenplay and splashed ‘FLYING SAUCERS GALORE’ across its front page. A UFO expert (and science teacher) from Manchester, Jenny Randles, was working full time following up stories reported to the paper’s telephone hotline and ‘UFO Bureau’. Accounts ranging from bright-orange lights in the sky to dome- and cigar-shaped things poured in. Two came from pilots. According to the Express, the question on everyone’s lips was: ‘Whether or not you believe, can all these people be wrong?’

Decades later I learnt that Columbia Pictures had invested $19 million in the publicity for Close Encounters. It became one of the largest advertising campaigns in the studio’s history, but the gamble paid off. Ponderous trailers shown to audiences before the opening of Star Wars helped to build up a sense of anticipation. A mystical light drew viewers onwards, seeking the end of a long, dark desert road somewhere in the American West and, for the benefit of anyone not already sure, the voice-over spelt out precisely what a close encounter actually was. Encounters of the first kind were close shaves with extraterrestrial craft; the second involved a UFO landing, or leaving behind some form of physical evidence; the third was a sighting of, or contact with a UFO crew, of the type described by the schoolboys in the ‘Welsh Triangle’.

The more I read about the movie as an adult the more I realised how much Spielberg shared my childhood fascination with UFOs. When he was a teenager in Arizona a sighting made by his boy scout troop inspired him to script and film a 135-minute, 8mm science fiction film, Firelight. Made for just $500, it generated a profit and encouraged the young director to produce a treatment called Watch the Skies. This was based upon the idea of a government cover-up of the UFO evidence. The hero was a sceptic who exposed a US Air Force plot to conceal humanity’s first direct contact with aliens. Spielberg replaced the title with Close Encounters after reading The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry, by the American astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek. A well-thumbed copy sat on my shelf and I knew that Hynek had once acted as consultant to the US Air Force’s official investigation of UFOs, Project Blue Book. In return for the use of his phrase, he also landed a cameo role at the end of Spielberg’s movie. Like the character in the original script, Hynek had begun his career as a sceptic but, in an astonishing turnaround after the closure of Blue Book, he had become convinced that some UFOs represented a phenomenon that was genuinely unexplained.

By this time I was captivated by what I now describe as the ‘UFO syndrome’. The word ‘syndrome’ is often used to refer to symptoms of a disease but it can also mean a combination of beliefs and behaviour that become attached to a subject, in this case UFOs. Unlike other descriptors it encompasses the entire human phenomenon of seeing UFOs, believing in them and communicating ideas about what they might be. It accurately describes the state of mind of my younger self in 1978. To steal a phrase that would eventually become a cliché, after my visit to the cinema I wanted to believe. Everything I had absorbed from those paperbacks was confirmed by the movie, just as it had been anticipated by the television programmes I had watched in childhood. After this I felt I didn’t need to meet aliens in the flesh – Spielberg and the BBC scriptwriters who created Doctor Who had neatly stitched all the pieces of the puzzle together for me.

The opening scene from Close Encounters needed no explanation for anyone already familiar with the Bermuda Triangle legend. During a sandstorm in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, a crack team of scientists investigating strange happenings across the globe discover a perfectly preserved group of prop-driven planes of Second World War vintage. It was obvious to those in the know that the Avenger torpedo bombers were Flight 19; Charles Berlitz’s books told us their crews had disappeared ‘without a trace’ shortly after the end of the war – within the Bermuda Triangle.

As the film progresses, the plot zooms in upon one of the key characters, Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss). Neary is a power engineer who, like Paul on the road to Damascus, is zapped by a beam of light from a UFO on a lonely highway. Abandoning his wife and young family, he sets off on an obsessive quest to discover the truth about his close encounter. The supernatural quality of his experience is replicated in Spielberg’s UFOs, which appear to combine modern technology with ancient magic, turning night into day with their piercing beams of light, throwing objects around like poltergeists and implanting irresistible compulsions in the minds of those they select for contact.

Close Encounters depicts the US government going to great lengths to stop Neary and his fellow contactees from reaching their goal. Here Spielberg neatly presents his audience with another foundation stone of ufology: the idea that an elite cabal of military and government officials conspire to hide ‘the truth’ from the public. But